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| - Fact Check: Viral picture of ailing Julian Assange is AI-generated, NOT real
Many shared the photo of the WikiLeaks founder on social media, believing it to be real.
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India Today Fact Check
This is an AI-generated image.
This week has been eventful for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his well-wishers. Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Stephen Smith visited Assange in prison in London on April 4, 2023. The same day, two leaders from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), after securing their visitation rights, were barred at the last minute from visiting him by the Belmarsh Prison Governor, who accused them of being “journalists”.
Amid all these dramatic events and protests worldwide to mount pressure on the US and the UK to drop charges against Assange, a close-up shot of the controversial activist has gone viral on social media. In the picture, he looks sick and afflicted.
A Facebook user while sharing the viral photo wrote, “Latest picture of Julian Assange in the UK prison. There is no such thing as freedom of speech. The Establishment is run by thugs.” Many prominent public figures, including Karuna Nundy among others, have shared it.
The Supreme Court lawyer quote-retweeted a viral post containing the picture, and said: “Even purely on medical grounds, Assange cannot be made to remain in this state.” Archived versions of the posts can be seen here and here.
India Today found that the viral picture is not real, but AI-generated.
The photo
On a closer look, a prominent watermark — “photo property of E” — could be seen running diagonally throughout the picture. We reverse-searched the photo and found the earliest instance of this image appearing on the internet.
A Twitter user who goes by the name “The ErrantFriend” first shared it on March 30. Alongside the picture they wrote, “You absolutely MUST free Julian Assange. It is time sensitive and urgent. He does not have another year to wait behind bars while the wheels of ‘justice’ crush him slowly. Now is the moment. Now is when you speak, when you rise.”
We went through the Twitter account and found it was full of AI-generated images. On earlier occasions, they had shared AI-generated pictures of former US President Donald Trump and Assange. They claimed authorship of these images on Twitter.
We contacted “The ErrantFriend” for confirmation. Speaking to India Today, they didn’t reveal their name and introduced themselves as a former central developer of the Assange DAO and other Assange-related projects. AssangeDAO is a cross-border collective that raises funds for Assange’s legal defence using cryptocurrency and NFTs. They, however, confirmed the photo was AI-generated.
The anonymous Twitter user told us that they used Midjourneys version 5, an AI image creator tool to carefully manufacture it, and then watermarked the photo to make people know about its origin.
What circumstances led to the creation of this image?
On being asked about their intentions or the context behind creating such a distressing image of Assange, they said, “I intended to create an image based on the documented happenings around Assange. After his arrest, he was barred from public appearances, including at his own trials. This means the public is unable to witness what has been done to him, but there is evidence of his decline mentally and physically.”
“I sought, through this image, to create something that put people into a moral quandary. What does the public do when they can actively see that state of being? If we were to unerase his face,” added The ErrantFriend. They also stressed that it was important to give Assange’s plight a more human face, the face the intelligence community has supposedly worked overtime to erase.
Assange has been held in the Belmarsh high-security prison in southeast London since 2019. He currently faces extradition to the US to be tried before a federal grand jury on account of 18 charges, 17 of which are under the infamous Espionage Act. He will serve 175 years in prison if found guilty of charges filed by the US Department of Justice.
(Written by Vikas Bhadauria)
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